Geopolitics lightly frames the romance between Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in the 1951 Hollywood classic The African Queen. Signally missing from the film, set in East Africa during World War I, are Africans themselves: They feature in a patronizing vignette at the beginning and are then promptly marched away by the villainous Germans for forced labor. In real life, an estimated 300,000 of them died in the war between their rival colonial masters.

Anyone from the Baltic states or Poland may feel similarly written off in a new podcast series by the German newspaper Die Welt. Titled Ernstfall (roughly, “serious emergency”), the five episodes are based on a war game, set in October 2026, in which Russia attacks Lithuania, exposing—mild spoiler—disunity in NATO and indecision in Germany. The exercise was conducted on behalf of the Berlin-based newspaper by the German Wargaming Center at Bundeswehr University in Hamburg.

A team of 16 German and international bigwigs—retired officials, a sitting parliamentarian, and various experts—play the leading parts in a “Blue Team” and “Red Team,” representing Western decision-makers and their Russian counterparts, respectively. Other participants were not part of the on-site war game but dialed in to play bit parts in the podcast. They included figures representing NATO, the European Union, and the United States. Bartlomiej Kot, a Polish think-tanker, played his country’s prime minister. Though he has barely a minute of airtime in the five episodes, in the final moments of the podcast the scriptwriters do depict Poland as seizing the initiative from the dithering Germans, suggesting an armed airlift to Lithuania to push back against the Russian invaders. Whether its European allies back Warsaw is left as a cliffhanger.

The Lithuanians do not even get that consolation. Their country is not only invaded but also insulted, depicted by the podcast as defenseless and clueless: überrumpelt—“caught off guard” or “steamrolled,” which takes less than two minutes of Episode 2. Eitvydas Bajarunas, a former Lithuanian ambassador, described this as “undeserved ‘anti-advertising’” for his country.

In truth, Lithuania, like the other Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, would be no pushover. Its excellent foreign and military intelligence services are highly vigilant toward both the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and neighboring Belarus, the Kremlin satrapy that Russia used as a staging ground to invade Ukraine in 2022. In the podcast, one of Russia’s regular military exercises in Belarus serves to assemble troops for the invasion; in real life, a concentration of invasion-capable troops close to NATO’s border would prompt urgent, immediate readiness in the frontier states.

Lithuania has a small but capable regular army of around 17,000 in peacetime, plus another 41,000 soldiers who can be quickly mobilized. Having suffered decades of often brutal Soviet occupation, a majority of Lithuanians would take up arms to defend their country (compared with only one-sixth of Germans), according to recent polls. The contention that Russia could demand and create, all but unopposed, a “humanitarian corridor” from Belarus to Kaliningrad across Lithuanian territory with only 15,000 troops is fanciful. The idea that neighboring countries, notably regional military heavyweight Poland—with the largest army in the EU—would sit back and let this happen seems equally questionable.

True, Lithuania’s military position is difficult. Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst and frequent Foreign Policy contributor who plays Russia’s defense chief in the war game, notes that “Russia does not need to physically control terrain to cut off the Baltics.” Long-range precision strikes, using drones, missiles, and artillery, could hit targets in Lithuania. Without the United States (more about that later), NATO would struggle to fight back. That, too, would impose a dilemma on Germany and other allies, most notably Poland. Would Warsaw risk all-out war with Russia to protect the Baltic states? Only those with access to Poland’s top-secret national defense plan know the answer to that.

Such questions, though, go far beyond the remit of the podcast. Die Welt’s chief international security correspondent, Carolina Drüten, explained that the goal of the war game was not to model Lithuania’s fate or decision-making. “It was built to stress-test German crisis decision-making under time pressure and political uncertainty,” she said.

In this and other respects, the podcast certainly succeeds. The German decision-makers, conscientious and well-meaning, are audibly daunted by the pace of events and the scale of the problem. They are intimidated by the fear of escalation. A cyberattack, presumably from Russia, has knocked out the country’s savings banks and created lines at ATMs. (Germany is still a cash-using country.) Perhaps more such hybrid attacks are imminent. They are told that the German NATO brigade based in Lithuania is not battle-ready and that the Russians have placed mines around the base. So the Germans stay in their barracks.

The Germans are all but dumbstruck by the lack of U.S. support. The Trump administration is celebrating the cease-fire that it has, according to the scenario, recently brokered in Ukraine. Washington does not want to be drawn into a new war in Europe, and Moscow’s framing of the invasion as a “humanitarian intervention” provides a convenient excuse. That undermines NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, which states that an attack on any alliance member—in this case, Lithuania—is an attack on all. At most, the United States will allow its military assets to be used as part of NATO’s regional defense plan—but only if the alliance can reach consensus and never in direct confrontation with Russia.

Bereft of their security hegemon, the people running Europe’s biggest and richest country fail to fill the gap. Though they ignore the Kremlin’s offer of long-term cheap gas deals in exchange for staying out of the conflict, the German decision-makers get bogged down in process and distracted by domestic detail. They mull a public advertising campaign to explain the seriousness of the situation to the populace. Posters at bus stops, perhaps. To signal seriousness, they agree to announce the reintroduction of mandatory military service—thereby wasting time on questions that will not arise for months, such as where to accommodate future conscripts. They engage in anguished, morally loaded debates: Should they cancel hip operations to free up capacity in hospitals for potential casualties?

Meanwhile, the Russian invaders are laying mines, building fortifications, and presumably beginning to inflict the horrors of occupation on the Lithuanians. Remember Bucha in Ukraine? Marijampole, a crossroads city with 49,000 inhabitants now under fictive Russian rule, would likely meet a similar fate.

With the United States missing in action, the EU tries to fill the gap with its own mutual defense clause: Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union. This obliges all EU countries to come to the aid of any member that is the victim of armed aggression. But with what? In the podcast, the decision-makers consider using an “EU Battlegroup,” an untested multinational force of 5,000 soldiers designed for peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. It hardly seems likely to dislodge the much larger, heavily armed Russian units now in Lithuania. And where is the consensus to activate the clause? The Russian team quickly activates Kremlin proxies in Hungary and other EU member states.

All this dithering and disunity reflects the real gulf revealed in the series. The Russians—the stars of the show—know exactly what they want and are willing to take risks, to make decisions quickly, and to accept sacrifices to get it. The Germans and their colleagues will not and do not. The Kremlin’s aim, expressed in real life and echoed by the podcast participants, is to turn the clock back to the 1990s, push NATO out of the countries of the former Soviet empire, and create a buffer zone of weak states ripe for Kremlin mischief (think present-day Georgia). By successfully invading Lithuania, Russia not only cuts off the Baltic states from the rest of Europe, but it also breaks trans-Atlantic unity and paralyzes NATO. The Germans recognize all this and are horrified, but they are unable to articulate aims of their own. Their instinct is to de-escalate, not to win. The lessons of this debacle for Germans and those who depend on them are powerful and unsettling.

Die Welt’s podcast is innovative for Germany, reflected by the long, pedantic explanations to listeners that the scenario is fictitious, that the “breaking news” updates are AI-generated, and that the aim is not warmongering. Of course, anyone mixing fiction and reality in the mass media needs to tread carefully; one need only remember the panic caused in the United States in 1938 by Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” radio drama, which featured a purported Martian invasion of Earth. But that so much throat-clearing was thought necessary highlights the gulf between the tender sensibilities of German listeners, still rooted in the comforting certainties of the post-1991 world order, and the way people think in the hard-bitten countries farther east, where the existence of a Russian threat is taken for granted and the risk of war baked into everyday life. In any case, the newspaper’s trigger warnings seem to have failed. On Die Welt’s website and elsewhere, scandalized listeners have denied any Russian aggressive intent and decried what they consider the paper’s endorsement of German “militarism.”

However praiseworthy Die Welt’s efforts, they are belated. If confronting the public with war scenarios is a media revolution in Germany, other European countries have been exploring this genre for years. There, both podcasts and TV shows have prompted lively and sometimes agonized public discussions about readiness, societal cohesion, and the threatening geopolitical environment. The Norwegian TV series Okkupert (“Occupied”), for example, depicts the country as betrayed by European allies who accept Russian hegemony in exchange for cheap energy supplies. First screened in 2015, the 24-episode series shows Norway’s democratic institutions and the rule of law salami-sliced by local collaborators under the Kremlin’s steadily tightening grip. Even in the pre-Donald Trump era, the Americans stand by.

Duplicitous Americans and treasonous politicians also feature in the six-part Finnish TV series Konflikti (“Conflict”), from 2024. It begins with “little green men,” unbadged soldiers of the kind used by Russia during its invasion of Crimea in 2014, occupying a peninsula in southern Finland. A heroic band of conscripts (the series was produced in cooperation with the country’s defense forces) leads the resistance until the Finnish government finally gets a grip.

The new German podcast closely echoes one produced last year in Britain by Sky News defense editor Deborah Haynes. Her series The Wargame also features retired officials standing in for decision-makers who must grapple with NATO disunity. (The Americans, as usual, dump their allies.) But in Haynes’s scenario, Russia starts by actually attacking Britain. The exercise not only reveals the country’s shocking—and all-too-real—lack of air defenses. It also forces participants to consider military responses, including the use of nuclear weapons.

That gritty dimension is missing from Die Welt’s series. Russia never comes close to launching missiles against German cities, whereas the assumption that Lithuania is a pushover is baked into the script. To round out the picture, Die Welt has also published a lengthy interview with Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene, and a forthcoming “bonus episode” of the podcast will reflect Lithuanian perspectives.

That will help the podcast’s producers rebut charges of engaging in a version of Orientalism by denying agency to the directly affected actors. But these additions do not excuse the podcast participants’ failure, over nearly three hours of intense discussion, to consider the countries and peoples of Eastern Europe as real. War happens there and to them—but never here or to us. The podcast admirably reveals this skewed, self-centered approach and its disastrous consequences. Neither Germans nor Lithuanians nor anyone should sleep more easily as a result.